Internet Connections Growing At 25%; Broadband 20% Of The Total Connections;

A Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) paper (PDF file) on the internet access and tariffs suggests that broadband is taking off in India. (Subscribers in TRAI speak is internet connections. The number of users is different since there can be multiple users for a single connection. IAMAI usually measures users which it puts at 37 million).

-Close to two million broadband subscribers at last count. As of October, there are 1.92 million broadband connections in India. This is roughly 20 per cent of the total internet subscriber base, says TRAI.
-Broadband is out-stripping dial-up. Of 1.39 million subscribers added in 2005-06, 1.16 million were broadband subscribers. So broadband off-take is much higher than dial-up.
-20 million broadband subs expected by 2010. TRAI has set a target of 40 million internet subscribers by 2010 and broadband is expected to account for 50 per cent of that. (As of 2006, the broadband off-take is behind target. As against the target of 3 million, only 0.18 million broadband subscribers were added till end 2005.)
-Internet sub growth growing at 25%. Annual growth rate of the internet subscribers seen for the last three years is about 25 per cent. Growth rate for the quarter ending June-06 has been 11%, which traslates into about 44 per cent on an annualised basis.
-PSUs lead the pack. 86% of the total Internet subscriber base (including broadband) is with five leading ISPs – BSNL (43.07%), MTNL (19.26%), Sify (11.83%), VSNL (6.12%), and Bharti Tele-Ventures (5.73%).

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